Data storage devices may use different types of storage to store and provide access to data, such as primary storage and one or more caches. Primary storage is where data is primarily and persistently stored, and the cache is where data is stored to provide quick access to data. The cache is used to improve the efficiency of the corresponding data storage device. The cache typically includes memory hardware that is more expensive but more quickly accessed than that of primary storage. For example, the cache may be volatile memory or non-volatile flash memory and the primary storage may be disk-based storage.
During certain database operations, such as the initialization of a blank file, large amounts of data must be written to persistent storage. Often, a region of such data can be described completely by a relatively small amount of metadata. In a simplest instance, a blank file is initialized in binary format as all zeroes.
Other metadata may describe the header and/or the body of other blank file formats, including proprietary formats for blank files. Before using a newly created blank database file, the database must initialize each data block allocated for the file. However, writing an initialized blank file generated can be a time consuming process, especially for large files.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.